So this issue is partially solved at this point ... now it has turned into something else
As I previously mentioned, on July 5th, 2021 we moved our Ceph servers over to 25Gb fiber instead of 10Gb copper .. at least that's what we thought.
I turns out it seems there is a bug in the GUI of Proxmox related to ifupdown2 and applying network configuration live. On July 5th, I had changed the IPs from 10Gb NICs over to 25Gb NICs but it turns out the GUI said that there were no IPs on the 10Gb and only on the 25Gb but on the command line I find that the IPs never came off of the 10Gb NICs although in the GUI it showed that nothing was on them.
So this problem of Ceph client nodes not being able to access the Ceph storage turns out to be that the IPs actually got removed on reboot.
The question now is, is this bug in the GUI known about? and in the mean time, is there a recommendation for a smooth transition from 10Gb copper to 25Gb fiber as now I have to do the job, that took 2 hours the first time on a holiday, all over again and I don't believe I can trust the GUI to make the correct NIC IP address changes and actually correctly remove the IPs from the old NICs.
Obviously, this time, I need to be sure that Ceph and Ceph clients will all be running over the 25Gb fiber when finished with the minimal of down time.
So the whole problem turned into a networking issue caused by the Proxmox GUI giving me incorrect information. Please, don't anyone flame me for this, it's simply a statement of fact. I maintain these servers to the latest patch level and have adjusted config files and so on over the years so the cluster is healthy and Ceph is healthy. We are running Ceph on Dell R740 NVMe nodes with 17 NVMe drives per node and each drive is a single OSD. As previously mentioned, the Ceph cluster from the beginning has been IPv6 only and continues to be.
Also, as far as this bug is concerned with not removing IP addresses from NICs although the GUI shows them removed, is this issue gone in Proxmox 7.0? I understand ifupdown2 is standard for 7.0.